Global Courant
Daniel Ellsberg, the historic whistleblower who exposed longstanding doubts and government deceptions about the Vietnam War through the leak of the Pentagon Papers and spurred retaliatory actions by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, has passed away. He turned 92.
Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by a spokesperson, Julia Pacetti.
Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports of the Department of Defense’s 47-volume, 7,000-page study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. .
‘Talent of discretion’
A Harvard graduate, he self-described as a “cold warrior” who served as a private and government adviser to Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risking his life on the battlefield, gaining the highest security clearances and gaining the trust of officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.
He was especially appreciated, he would later remark, for his ‘talent for discretion’.
But like millions of other Americans in and out of government, he had turned against the years of the Vietnam War, the administration’s claims that the battle could be won and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the US-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region.
However, unlike many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.
“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders was as disillusioned as I was by a war they considered hopeless and endless,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
“By 1968, if not before, they all, like me, wanted to get us out of this war.”
The Pentagon papers
The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a leading war advocate who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the US and Vietnam and help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would to make. don’t give in until long after.
The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed colonization attempts in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing US involvement, including the bombings and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when newly elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
In 1959, Ellsberg worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corp., a global policy think tank in Santa Monica, California, advising the Department of Defense and the White House on nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decisions. to make.
In the mid-1960s, he spent two years at the State Department in Vietnam, learning firsthand how military and political officials casually lied. There he became convinced that the conflict could not be won, partly because of the firefights with the North Vietnamese that he survived.
LOOK | The National interviews Ellsberg about the Pentagon Papers anniversary:
The Pentagon Papers and the Man Who Leaked Them | The National Interview
Nearly 50 years after The Pentagon Papers leaked, a film about that groundbreaking moment and the man who leaked them is up for an Academy Award. For The National Interview, Adrienne Arsenault sits down with Daniel Ellsberg, who risked everything to tell Americans that the Nixon administration lied to them about the Vietnam War
Copying top secret documents
Encouraged by a close friend of Rand’s, researcher Anthony J. Russo, Ellsberg had decided by the fall of 1969 that the Nixon administration would continue the policies of other presidents and that the McNamara study should be seen. His life would soon resemble a spy thriller.
Ellsberg took some of the bound, secret books from his safe in the Rand offices, put them in his briefcase, and walked past guards and a sign that read “Loose Lips Sink Ships”.
Because Russo’s girlfriend owned an advertising agency, Ellsberg spent months copying the documents onto an office Xerox machine, sometimes aided by his teenage son, Robert. Occasionally, the office alarm would go off accidentally, the police would show up and leave shortly after.
Ellsberg became so concerned that he began cutting off the “Top Secret” markings from the papers, in case authorities wanted to inspect more closely.
The Pentagon Papers were first published in The New York Times in June 1971, followed by The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and more than a dozen others.
The classified documents documented that the U.S. had defied a 1954 settlement that banned a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war into neighboring countries, and planned to send U.S. soldiers even as Johnson swore he would. T.
‘The Most Dangerous Man in America’
The identity of the leaker became a national gamble and Ellsberg proved an obvious suspect, given his access to the newspapers and his public denunciation of the war over the past two years.
With the FBI in hot pursuit, he turned himself in to authorities in Boston, became a hero of the anti-war movement and a traitor to the supporters of the war, labeled the “most dangerous man in America” by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger , with whom Ellsberg had once been friendly.
Ellsberg holds up a magazine during a television appearance in June 1971. (The Associated Press)
The Nixon administration quickly tried to block further publication on the grounds that the papers would endanger national security, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the papers on June 30, 1971, a landmark First Amendment ruling that overturned previous restraint was rejected.
Nixon himself, unconcerned at first because the papers predated his term, was determined to punish Ellsberg and formed a renegade team of White House “plumbers”, endowed with a stash of White House “hush money” and the mission to stop future leaks to prevent.
Ellsberg was on trial in Boston and Los Angeles on federal charges of espionage and robbery, with a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. He had expected to go to prison, but was spared in part by Nixon’s anger and the excesses of those around him.
The Boston case ended in a mistrial because the government wiretapped conversations between a defense witness and his attorney.
The charges in the Los Angeles trial were dismissed after Judge Matthew Byrne learned that White House “plumbers” G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills, California.
Ellsberg is survived by his second wife, the journalist Patricia Marx, and three children, two from his first marriage.
